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Every summer, contemporary artworld mover and shaker Hannah Barry and a team of young collaborators take over Peckham’s disused multistorey car park for a programme of cutting-edge events. Now they've launched a campaign to turn it into a year-round arts hub

Today a group of enterprising twenty- and thirtysomethings unveil their ambitious proposal to develop the 10-storey Peckham Rye car park into a permanent arts centre. For the past six years, it has been the site of Hannah Barry Gallery’s annual summer sculpture exhibition Bold Tendencies, and Barry, 30, and her gallery co-founder Sven Mündner, 34, are at the forefront of the plan to transform it into a year-round creative hub.

“We’ve already proved there is an enormous audience for visual art in Peckham,” Barry says. “We can bring in new people, new voices, new money.”

Not only would the Peckham Complex transform the neighbourhood and south London at low cost (£10 million), within two years it would create more than 500 new jobs. “It will be very cheap and lean to run,” Barry says. “We already have the destination. It’s not like we’re creating a new place.”

Campaigning under the title of Bold Tendencies — the name of Barry and Mündner’s non-profit organisation set up in 2007 to commission site-specific projects across sculpture, film, dance and music — Barry and the team plan a mixed-use reinvention of the building to incorporate the existing PeckhamPlex Cinema on the ground floor. “There will be light industrial spaces, studio spaces and we’re very keen on Kunsthalle-style [independent] galleries.”

The sustainable self-initiated new model for an arts building is, Barry believes, an embodiment of the Big Society where residents, businesses and the local council come together. The local community will gain an “uplifted environment”, social benefits and stimulated activity in the high street.

The annual summer sculpture show, also called Bold Tendencies, has already proved successful, attracting half a million visitors — including Tate director Nicholas Serota and Jay Jopling of White Cube — to date. Its rooftop Frank’s Café & Campari Bar, a sinuous, red tent-like structure designed by Lettice Drake and Paloma Gormley (daughter of Antony) of Practice Architecture, has been an added draw.

Arguably, the group’s great strength is that Barry can ask for help from a fluid network of young professionals and other collaborators — chefs, architects, engineers, lawyers. Many are old schoolfriends. Barry first met architect Gormley, 26, when they ran club nights together. Yancey Strickler, co-founder of crowd-funding website Kickstarter, is a friend.

“We’re all the same generation,” Barry explains. “We talk about this a lot. It’s because opportunities are so difficult to come by that when one happens, you have to treat it really carefully and bring in as many people as you can. I think that spirit of generosity and openness is the way that things that can get done in our time as it is — because it’s not easy to do anything.”

Philanthropy is not about how much money you’ve got, she says sincerely, it’s “about a state of mind”, what — and how — can you give?

Currently Bold Tendencies’ summer occupation is of the top four floors of the car park. Practice Architecture has added a welcome lobby and a “barley straw auditorium” for poetry readings, the book market and gigs. Events are free for the summer programme; you simply sign up online. ‘It’s like a public square elevated in the sky,” says Joe Balfour, 28, Bold Tendencies’ head of programming. The events on offer are commissioned, he says, to “respond to the unique values of the site and its extraordinary views over London”.

Past hits have included a symphony orchestra performing on the roof and programmed dance by The Place and Sadler’s Wells. Cross-pollination excites Barry. “Whenever we met anyone new we just invited them along,” she says.

In 2011 Bloomberg came on board as the first corporate sponsor. It may all sound as if success is assured but Bold Tendencies’ future is not secure. The council-owned site and cinema is technically up for sale. Now that Peckham is a newly desirable location (thanks in part to the East London Overground extension) the fear is that a developer could make a multi-million pound offer to bulldoze it and build flats.

Hence the pre-emptive strike. Barry and Mündner are not against regeneration but would hate the site to be cannibalised. “With the arts centre, we can propose a model that is stronger than selling the car park and generate more rates and more cash in terms of jobs,” Barry says.

Team Barry have compiled a report into the history of the area to support plans for the building — launched online today at peckhamcomplex.com. The new set-up would create 180 full-time jobs on site, alongside 135 part-time or temporary jobs, 250-300 freelance contracts with mainly south London self-employed experts and a further 60-100 jobs in SE15 through increased secondary spending. And they have powerful allies. Property developer Stuart Lipton is helping them with strategy, as is David Cameron’s technology adviser, Rohan Silva.

Also announced today is the 2013 Bold Tendencies programme — the most ambitious yet — with commissions by artists Nina Beier, Steven Claydon and Benedict Drew, a rooftop garden inspired by Derek Jarman’s Dungeness garden, and a contemporary music festival featuring Thurston Moore (of Sonic Youth), Glenn Branca, free jazz legend Peter Brötzmann and techno star Theo Parrish. There’s a Nollywood film festival as part of the African Season (Peckham has the largest Nigerian community in the country). Wayne McGregor and Random Dance will be running workshops for children. To fund this three-month programme, starting at the end of June, the group have launched a £50,000 Kickstarter campaign.

Barry is an enabler. “For me, creating a system of opportunity is really exciting, whether it’s finding a way to commission new work in a site in London, and give young international artists a chance to show really ambitious projects, or finding a way to manage 60,000 visitors on a roof, bringing in people to run online ticketing, design the graphics, provide delicious food and drink.” And she has made stars of her young collaborators. Practice Architecture’s Drake and Gormley, with their self-build, make-do, dismantle ethos, have been dubbed the young female architects of their generation by Domus magazine. “We were still students when Hannah commissioned us,” says Drake, 27. “It’s empowering how much trust she invests.”

Bartender Frank Boxer, who created the menu for Frank’s with chef Michael Davies, admits they frankly hadn’t a clue at the start. “That’s the amazing thing about Hannah. She makes fun ideas into reality.” Today Boxer, now 26, runs The Brunswick House Café in Vauxhall. And Barry (one of the 15 people who will define the future of arts in Britain, according to the Independent), who now has a gallery on Bond Street, is about to move her Peckham space to a huge warehouse next to Peckham Rye station, as well as launching a new tapas joint, called the Peckham Refreshment Rooms. Along with curator Ollie Hogan and Grace Welch (sister of musician Florence), she will be taking artists to the Venice Biennale again this summer (Bloomberg is sponsoring Palazzo Peckham). But her allegiance remains to conserving the car park in SE15.

Head chef this year will be Coco Bayley (daughter of critic Stephen Bayley), who cut her teeth at Frank’s — another example of Barry’s creative system of opportunity. “We see Bold Tendencies as a conveyor belt giving people the first opportunity to step up and do their own project,” says Sven. “Then they take that energy with them and do something new.” It’s a spirit you have to admire.